Elbox
Computer is happy to announce availability of a new
version of the spider.device driver for the Poseidon
stack for the SPIDER and SPIDER II High-Speed USB 2.0
controllers. The
new software is available free of charge for all registered
users of the SPIDER and SPIDER II High-Speed USB 2.0
controllers.

The SPIDER software has been reworked in order to achieve
the maximum possible performance, especially when SPIDER
is used in the Mediator systems equipped with the Radeon
9200 graphic card. The
large memory on the Radeon cards enables expansion of
the DMA buffer used by PCI cards in the busmaster mode.
The spider.device ver. 3.16 allows setting the DMA buffer
size for the Spider EHCI controller from 40 kB (as used
in the previous spider.device versions) up to 2 MB.
The size of the Spider DMA buffer
is defined by the Envarc:Mediator/SpiderBuf variable.
Go to the tests
page to learn the benchmarksfor the SPIDER card with the DMA
buffer set to 2 MB. The tests were performed on Amiga
1200 and Mediator 1200 TX with the most popular turbo
cards. A 4 GB USB memory stick was used in the tests.

The Hi-Speed USB mass storage devices connected to the
SPIDER USB controller reach 3 to 5 MBytes/s (depending
on the turbo card), which is fast enough to allow comfortable
work with the USB devices like memory sticks, digital
cameras and Flash card readers. In case of hard drives
we still recommend connecting them to the FastATA controllers,
which allow twice as fast transfers (5 to 10 MBytes/s)
in the same turbo card configuration (see the FastATA
MK-III benchmarks).

Now we are working on the OS4 native USB 2.0 drivers
for the Sirion USB stack. They
will be included in the next SPIDER update.